If you want your team to play football a particular way, shouldn’t your training prepare them to solve the problems that way of playing creates?
This is the question that sits at the heart of Vítor Frade’s Tactical Periodisation, a methodology developed at the University of Porto which challenges the traditional separation of physical, technical, tactical and psychological preparation. Rather than treating these as independent components of training, Frade considers them interconnected dimensions of football itself. The game is the reference point; everything we do on the training ground should have a relationship with the way we intend to play.
The starting point is the Game Model: a coherent understanding of how a team should behave in the different moments of a match. From there, the coach designs training exercises that expose players to the situations, decisions and relationships they will encounter during competition. If we want to progress through the middle, for example, simply practising passing combinations isn’t enough. We need to create situations in which players must recognise spaces, understand positional relationships, identify passing opportunities and make decisions under pressure. The physical demands of those exercises emerge alongside their technical and tactical requirements.
Three methodological ideas particularly interest me. Specificity means that training should reflect the intended way of playing. Propensities means designing exercises that encourage certain behaviours to emerge, rather than prescribing every movement in advance. Complex Progression recognises that learning isn’t linear; the coach must continually adjust the difficulty and demands of training as players develop their understanding. Frade also describes Horizontal Alternation in Specificity, whereby different training demands are emphasised across the week without abandoning the same underlying game model.
For Santi, this raises an interesting question about the relationship between what players know and what they can actually execute. Understanding where to position yourself is not the same as recognising when to move there; knowing that a passing option exists is not the same as having the technical ability or awareness to exploit it. The coach’s responsibility is to create an environment in which those relationships become increasingly natural, without removing the freedom that makes football an unpredictable game.
This is particularly relevant to the new FM27 training model. Rather than considering tactical development simply as a matter of learning a formation or accumulating familiarity, the game presents a more interesting distinction between Tactical Understanding and Tactical Effectiveness. It gives me an opportunity to consider not only whether players understand the collective principles, but how effectively that understanding is being translated into their football. The game must be in the training. The challenge is designing training that teaches the game without taking the game away from the players.
Frade’s work is particularly interesting to me because it offers a way of thinking about the responsibilities of a coach beyond simply selecting a formation or writing a set of instructions. Santi Bentancur studied sports science in Porto, where these ideas could have formed part of his education. He arrives in Lisbon with an appreciation for preparation, organisation and the importance of a coherent footballing identity; what he doesn’t yet know is how much complexity his players can absorb, or how effectively he can translate his ideas into their everyday football.
There is a difference between understanding a theory and applying it. I want that distinction to be part of Santi’s development. He isn’t arriving at Atlético CP as a finished coach, armed with a perfected methodology. He is beginning to discover what works, what doesn’t, and where his own understanding needs to evolve.
FM27 gives me some interesting tools with which to explore this. The training system exposes Tactical Understanding at player level, alongside progress across eight individual tactical areas: Passing Style, Build Up, Chance Creation, In Possession Shape, Line of Engagement, Pressing Intensity, Pressing Trap and Out Of Possession Shape. It also provides visibility of Player Tactical Ability and Tactical Complexity. I see these as related, but distinct considerations. A player might have a reasonable understanding of our intended approach while still struggling to execute it consistently. Equally, a player with considerable tactical ability might find the complexity of our collective demands challenging if the underlying principles haven’t been sufficiently developed. I don’t want to confuse familiarity with effectiveness, or assume that improving one automatically resolves the other. As you can see from the image, left, we are not in a particularly strong place with it right now, although this is to be expected with quite a heavily changed team over the summer.
This has now started to influence how I approach training. Rather than treating the calendar as a collection of sessions to fill, I want it to become a deliberate programme of development, with each period having a particular purpose. I’ve settled on four overarching phases for Bentancur’s training philosophy:
The intention is to change the emphasis of training according to the demands of the season, rather than attempting to maximise every aspect of development simultaneously.
BUILD | June–July
The six-week pre-season is dedicated to establishing the foundations. I’ve divided it into three smaller stages:
- Weeks 1–2: Build. Establish physical preparedness, develop conditioning and begin introducing the tactical foundations.
- Weeks 3–4: Integrate. Bring physical preparation and tactical work closer together, increasing the intensity and introducing more of the collective behaviours we want to see.
- Weeks 5–6: Prepare. Reduce the emphasis on heavy conditioning, sharpen match readiness and consolidate the work through friendlies and match preparation.
The objective is to arrive at the competitive season physically prepared, match sharp and with an initial understanding of our football. I don’t expect every tactical indicator to be complete; this is a foundation, not a finished product. Importantly, I want to use this period to establish a baseline. The Tactical Understanding indicators and the individual tactical areas give me something to monitor as we progress through the campaign. I can identify where the squad is starting from, rather than judging our development purely through match results or subjective impressions.
DEVELOP | August–October
This is where I want to invest most heavily in collective tactical understanding and effectiveness. Rather than distributing sessions randomly across the eight tactical areas, I’ve created a four-week rotation, revisiting each pairing throughout the period.
Each week, the two selected areas receive dedicated attention on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This gives us six tactical-understanding sessions, with each area being revisited twice. The image I have created details the timings of them in the week, with the match preparation sessions then being manually added following the weekly email – this will be driven by data from the data hub and reflections of team performances. You can see, below, what a mock up of it would look like with Sunday games across a two week period, with the former being filled by ‘Week A’ and the latter by ‘Week B.’ If we have any two-game weeks, then I would sacrifice this for more match prep and tag a further week on to the end, but, at the time of writing, fixtures haven’t been released.
The pairings I have chosen are deliberate. Week A establishes our positional relationships in both phases of play; Week B develops how we circulate and progress possession; Week C connects our attacking movements with our defensive starting positions; and Week D concentrates on the coordination and mechanisms of our pressing. I want to use the eight areas as more than a collection of indicators to improve. They represent the different components of our game model, and the rotation gives me a framework for developing them systematically. If our understanding of In Possession Shape improves, for example, I want to see whether that is reflected in better positional relationships and more effective progression during matches. The indicator is useful, but the football remains the ultimate test.
There is also a reason for retaining Individual Development throughout this phase. Collective understanding shouldn’t come at the expense of individual progression. Players have different starting points, different levels of tactical ability and different relationships with the demands of their roles. I want the team to become more coherent without expecting every player to develop at exactly the same rate.
I particularly like this structure because it gives the squad repetition without making every week identical. We revisit the same principles, but can adjust the emphasis when the tactical understanding indicators or performances suggest that a particular area needs more attention. I imagine that I could very much game this training and hit one block none stop to get it to maximum familiarity, but I don’t want to approach that in this way. A player might demonstrate improving Tactical Understanding (and, again, I can see that from an indvidual perspective at out starting point, below), but if our football isn’t becoming more effective, I need to investigate why. Perhaps the tactical demands are too complex; perhaps the individual lacks the attributes to execute the intended behaviour; perhaps our training isn’t sufficiently representative of the problems we encounter in matches. Equally, a good performance shouldn’t automatically convince me that the underlying development is complete. Results can disguise weaknesses just as easily as they can expose them.
This is where Frade’s influence becomes particularly interesting. The training programme should be informed by the game, and the game should inform what happens next on the training ground. The rotation is a starting framework, not a set of rules that I intend to follow blindly. I recognise that this isn’t a direct implementation of Frade’s Tactical Periodisation. FM27 gives me predefined training sessions and indicators, and I’m working within those constraints. The rotation is my attempt to give that system a coherent direction, rather than allowing the availability of training sessions to dictate our footballing education.
The final two phases are still works in progress and I will evaluate them when I get closer to the time.
MAINTAIN | November–January will shift the emphasis towards individual player development. By this point, I hope to have established a recognisable collective identity, allowing more training time to be invested in improving the individuals who will sustain it. Tactical effectiveness will remain important, but the winter fixture schedule will demand greater attention to workload management. I don’t want to lose the collective understanding we’ve developed, but neither do I want to sacrifice player development by continually prioritising tactical sessions.
MANAGE | February–May will focus on recovery, preserving performance and prioritising preparation for the next opponent. As fatigue accumulates and the season approaches its conclusion, the objective becomes getting the best possible performances from the players available to us, rather than continually trying to introduce new demands.
I’ll develop both phases in more detail as the season progresses.
Frade’s influence gives me a way of thinking about why we train; the new FM27 training model gives me a way of observing and experimenting with that development. The periodisation model is my first attempt at bringing those two things together at Atlético CP. Whether it works is another matter entirely. The game must be in the training. Now we need to find out how much of the game our players can learn, understand and ultimately execute
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